Tom Suozzi’s win in New York is worse for the GOP than corporate media is telling you!

The GOP failed on immigration...again

DEAN OBEIDALLAH

FEB 14, 2024

On Tuesday, Democrat Tom Suozzi crushed his GOP opponent in the special election to fill the congressional seat vacated by indicted former Rep. George Santos.  Now if the Republican had won, we would’ve seen non-stop corporate media stories for days declaring 2024 was going to be “Red Wave,” “Democrats are facing a bloodbath in November,” a “Red tsunami is on the way,” and other BS they peddled in the lead up to the 2022 midterm.

But with Suozzi—who I’ve known since our days at law school--defeating his opponent in a district that Republican Santos had won by nearly eight points, we instead see articles downplaying it. For example, the NY Times’s Nate Cohn telling us today, “Democrats claim another victory, although it doesn’t necessarily add more clarity about November.”

Here’s the truth: It doesn’t matter if the corporate media gets what happened because I’m betting the GOP leadership does and they know it’s bad. I’m talking very, very bad.

How can I say that? Simple, the GOP made the number one issue in this swing district special election “immigration.” Or more precisely, ginning up the fear of migrants and how they were going to destroy our nation, bring crime, etc.  

In fact, Republican PACs spent nearly $7 million to attack Suozzi on this issue with ads calling him the “Godfather of the Border Crisis” –which caused a rebuke from Italian American organizations given the smear that Italians are tied to the mafia. They incessantly ran ads with an old video clip of Suozzi saying, “I kicked ICE out of Nassau County.” (That line from Suozzi was from 2007 when he was Nassau County Executive and it was about ICE officers who had refused to coordinate with local police and who even broke down the door of innocent people because they had the wrong address.)

And everywhere Suozzi’s GOP opponent Mazi Pilip went, she spoke about the issue with lines like, "The third congressional district residents worry about our border crisis."  In fact, a poll released a week before the election found that voters responded that immigration was the Republican candidates top strength.

In response, though, Suozzi didn’t avoid the issue. Instead, he offered policy proposals to address concerns and told voters the truth, explaining, “We've had a problem on our border that started 35 years ago…The border crisis on our southern border is also a Washington,. D.C., crisis. Because nobody's cut a deal nobody's negotiated to actually solve this problem.” He candidly added that instead of fixing it, some have “been trying to weaponize it for political purposes for decades.” 

Suozzi even crashed his opponents press conference two weeks ago where she was fear mongering on the immigration issue, telling the press, “I’ve proposed concrete ideas about what needs to be done. She has not. I’m willing to debate, she’s not willing to debate.” He added, “I’m willing to tell you exactly where I stand on issues and I’ll answer any of your questions; she will not.”

And in worse news for the GOP, Suozzi then went on the offensive on immigration in the last weeks of the campaign by vocally supporting the proposed legislation championed by President Biden that would provide a massive $20 billion dollar investment in border security. What was his GOP opponent’s response to that proposed border security legislation? She did what Donald Trump demanded and opposed it—just as the Republicans in the House and Senate did over the past week.

That only helped Suozzi who continually slammed his GOP opponent on that point in the closing days of the campaign, telling local news, “She says she’s concerned about the border but she opposes the bipartisan solution that would actually close the border.” It’s clear people want policies to address issues, not GOP political games. 

Suozzi also made another issue a visible part of the campaign: Abortion. Democratic outside groups, including House Majority PAC, ran ads slamming Pilip on abortion, featuring a video of where she described herself as “pro-life.”  And in the only televised debate that the Republican candidate would agree to, Pilip dodged questions from Suozzi on whether she would describe herself as “pro-choice.” She also wouldn’t say whether she’d vote to protect abortion access at the federal level.

We know the issue of reproductive freedom animates people to vote because it’s personal. In fact, nothing is more personal than Republicans enacting laws that force a woman against her will to carry a fetus to term.

The GOP gets that as well which is why they pumped millions into this race to see if the “scare people about Brown immigrants” could be the silver bullet. It wasn’t. Instead, Suozzi-who was leading by only four points in polls a week before the election—won by nearly eight points. That means given Santos won the same district by eight points just two years earlier, Suozzi managed a 16-point swing in favor of Democrats.

There is something else though that the media is not picking up about what Suozzi did in this race. He continually reminded voters of the chaos in the GOP controlled House and called them out for not enacting policies to help Americans. That was the very point Suozzi made on my SiriusXM show last month as he slammed the infighting in the GOP House. In contrast, his message was “we have to work together to actually solve problems, to help the people, he added, “That is what people are clamoring for." (You can watch clip below.)

The Democrats victory in this special election tells us a few things. Abortion is and will remain a key issue for Democrats as long as the GOP continues to enact barbaric laws that force women to carry a fetus to term against their will. Voters in swing districts reject the GOP’s fear mongering on immigration and clearly have no tolerance for Trump/GOP’s political theater. And voters—as Suozzi stated—are clamoring for people to enact legislation that will help them and their families.  All of this favors the Democrats in 2024—bigly! 

https://deanobeidallah.substack.com/p/tom-suozzis-win-in-new-york-is-worse?r=kpx7j